Michael McCaul

A senior investigator who resigned from the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week is hitting back at the committee’s attempts to defend its investigation into the United States’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Jerry Dunleavy, a former Washington Examiner reporter who wrote a book about the fall of Kabul in the summer of 2021, joined the Foreign Affairs Committee at the behest of senior staff about a year ago. In his resignation letter that was made public last week, Dunleavy accused the committee and Chairman Michael McCaul of not running a serious investigation into the Biden administration’s withdrawal from the twenty-year war in Afghanistan.

Late last month, former president Donald Trump hosted the Gold Star families of the thirteen US military members who were slain in the 2021 Kabul Airport suicide bombing. “Trump was way more than I expected,” Christy Shamblin, the mother-in-law of Sergeant Nicole Gee, told me. “The contrast is stark with the president we met at Dover.”  Trump “knew so much about the event, the kids, Bagram and who made decisions… He was a normal human and made eye contact, answered every question, even the uncomfortable ones.” Following their meeting with Trump, the former president surprised them all by spending several more hours with them, as he signed pictures of their children — and even a pair of bedazzled high heels.